1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an access system in which a monitoring camera is connected to a network, such as the Internet, and a server is accessed by using an image captured by the monitoring camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, a variety of information described in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) can be interchanged on the World Wide Web (WWW). The Internet is greatly expandable and, in addition to the interchange of text data, a variety of information, e.g., still image information, moving image information, and Java programs, can be transferred. A user can obtain a lot of information via the Internet by linking resources in worldwide networks and can acquire information at a location designated by a unique URL (Uniform Resource Locator). In general, the URL specifies the address of an HTML file, for example, a homepage. Recently, for accessing organizations, URLs of homepages are described in various media such as magazines and signboards as well as on the Internet.
The Internet uses a system for distributing, in real time, video images such as a landscape by connecting a remote control camera. In this case, URLs are displayed on the signboards in the photographed video images.
Still images and moving images on the signboards on which the URLs are printed can be easily captured as digital image data. Since no link information is included in addition to the image information, after visually checking the URL, the user must access the homepage by starting the browser and inputting the URL, which is troublesome.